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(39 posts)

After i saw that maybe some options of the new Panel in KDE 4 are not so obvious to new users i thought i should write a howto. So here it comes.

At first start you are presented with this nice black bar on the bottom of the screen. It fills the entire space and is maybe polluted with some buttons or a clock or whatever your distro chose to put in.

So how can i configure it?

Well, at the right side of the panel you should see something like this:

Notice the little cashew right from the clock? It's the plasma logo by the way...Click on it and you are presented with a new bar on top of the panel.If you don't the this logo, it is possible that your widgets are locked. Just right-click anywhere on your desktop and choose "Unlock Widgets". Now you should see it.

How can i change the height of the panel?

So let's assume you are not happy with the height of the panel, you want a bigger one. What to do?On top of this new bar there is a handle.Drag it to the height of your choice.

And what about the width?

A bit hard to see, so see this screenshot.

See this litte blue and green triangles on the right? The green one is for the minimum width of the panel, the blue one is for the maximum width.Don't ask for the difference between them for now, i guess there is work going on.For now just drag the blue one to make the panel smaller and the green one to make it bigger.But that's not all. Maybe you are not satisfied with the aligment of the panel.Then use this:

Here you have the choice to align the panel to the right, the left, or center.And if you want a bit more finetuning, there is a third triangle in the center, a white one. With that you can put the panel on whatever position you want.

Ok, nice, but i don't like my panel on the bottom

Well, no problem. Simply drag the configuration bar above the panel to a position you want, left, right, top or bottom.

How can i add Widgets to my panel?

You maybe know the "Add Widget" dialog from the desktop. From there you can choose a widget and drag it onto a free place on the panel.But maybe that is hard sometimes, as there aren't many free places at all.So a better way can be this:Again go to the configuration bar for the panel, choose "Add Widget".Now select the widget you want. But don't drag it! Highlight it, and click the "Add Widget" button in the dialog. This way the widget automatically get's added to the panel, not the desktop.

Great, but the position is not what i wanted

No problem, that can be solved. When you are in the configuration modus (you clicked the cashew on he panel), hover over the different areas of the panel, and you will see a crosshair. with this crosshair you can move all currently active widgets on the panel to a position you want. And that was it.

Hope this was useful, if not, feel free to correct me. Any input welcome.

Well, at least other questions should be posted elsewhere as this is only for tutorials and tipps. See the plasma forum for example.Nevertheless, your first question.You can make it smaller the same way as you make it bigger. Just drag the handle to the bottom, not the top, and see if the resulting size fits your needs. Maybe i should add it to the howto.Regarding your second panel, maybe that will work in 4.2, so just be patient.

The first wish 'auto-cache' seems to be the auto-hide panel wish. This feature is implemented in KDE 4.2. For the second issue you could file a bug report on http://bugs.kde.org. There it can be discussed with the plasma developers.

By the way. New features will only be added to a stable release as 4.1.* in very rare cases. But KDE 4.2.0 should be released in January 2009.

Could you please add information on how to add a program to the panel which is not in the menu? I haven't found a way to do this while it is extremely simple to do in KDE3 and GNOME.

Overall I am quite disappointed about KDE4 so far ... I always preferred KDE over GNOME because it gave me more flexibility and more freedom to do what I wanted -- with KDE4 I know have the feeling of having even less freedom and flexibility in comparison to GNOME. Things got more difficult instead of easier (why would I have to search for a tiny visual hint when the same option could be clearly visible in a menu?).

Since you would probably want it in the menu anyway, use the menu editor to add it to the menu, then drag it to the panel from there. If you do not want it in the menu you could probably then delete it from the menu, but I do not know if the Plasma shortcut would still work.

Alternatively you could code your own *.desktop file, and drag that on to the panel ( I do not know how well that would work ) just make sure you do not delete the *.desktop file in question.